It was around year 11 of my 16 years of catholic education when I started to realize that praying was simply talking to myself. I was open to hearing some response but there was none. This realization came gradually. It was only a few years earlier that I figured out that Santa Claus isn’t real. If you find a sane adult who says they believe in Santa Claus I assume they are really atheists because they know they are claiming belief for something that doesn’t exist.
It isn’t just catholic schools that influenced me. My parents were very religious particularly my father. He was a biology professor and he had no problem teaching evolution. On the other hand, he was strict about issues related to sex including abortion. I was mortified but kept my mouth shut when he tried to tell me how I should be gentle on my honeymoon. He really thought we were virgins?!
My parents named me for the priest who introduced them to each other. That priest would move up the church hierarchy and might have become a cardinal if he had lived longer. I was fairly certain I would become a priest someday. The time between thinking I would become a priest and thinking that I’m an atheist was barely more than 1 year.
Santa wasn’t the only disappointment. I had a missal which included a long prayer (I seem to remember that it took 15 minutes to read) which came with a claim that if you said this prayer every day for 30 straight days you would get whatever you wished for. At this time I’m about 10 years old. What did I wish for? A woman. Please understand, this is not an overtly sexual wish. The wish came from a Disney “B” movie called The Moon Pilot. The astronaut was played by Tom Tryon who would go onto bigger fame as a novelist. This character, unhappily claustrophobic and scared of heights, is supposedly in a Mercury capsule on a Redstone rocket and headed toward the moon. This is unlikely since the Mercury/Redstone wasn’t strong enough to reach low earth orbit let alone the moon. He was aided by a woman played by Dany Saval. It was Ms. Saval that I was interested in. Not that I knew what we could possibly do together but I felt like I could use the company, much like the astronaut. Suffice it to say, I didn’t get my wish. This led me to a realization that everyone, believer or not, has to learn. Just because you pray for something, even praying very hard, you might not get it.
